Inside the 11th Hour

It consumes your thoughts. I know, you don’t want to admit it. Most of the time, neither do I because it’s

something trivial or fleeting or an idol I’ve created out of something that won’t last.

I won’t judge.

Because hear this loud and clear, I sure as heck don’t want your judgment spotlighted on me.

Stepping into this risk, I’m going to reveal what’s crept into just about every single one of my thoughts lately. Pervasive as dewy skin humidity.

I’ve been wondering about the 11^th hour. I’ve been giving too much credit to time. Time as we understand it.

Let me explain.

I’m not talking about Meg Ryan weeping on Billy Crystal’s shoulder, “I’m gonna be forty.” I am talking about this subconscious time table I have, regulating some sort of order of events in my brain. Picture a factory of clocks if you will. A factory creating a false sense of soundness and inaccurate logic.

Examples:

I hope to be published by…

I want my girls to learn this by…

I’m eager for my marriage to look like this by…

I will finally learn this by…

While you could easily call these expectations or goals (I’m a strong believer in goal-setting), I’m going to suggest they’re also linked to fruit. When you pour time and energy into something the typical consequence is that you experience evidence of time and energy invested.

Here’s the catch. The time catch.

Time is limited. Unpredictable. And sometimes time squashes fruit. Or it rots it, making those hopes and wants seem futile, if not ridiculous.

So we’re on the same page, I’m not merely referring to the seconds and days we’re granted here on earth, but the entire concept as a whole. Dreams can’t be crammed inside time. Or lessons. Or hope.

It is these thoughts that ground me when I begin to get desperate and worried things won’t come through for me in the 11^th hour. There’s still a window, I tell myself. There’s still hope. What if life is one gigantic 11^th hour? What if my faith is finding ways to come through for me all the time?

What I really want to know is when I began to let it slide—hope? When did I give time the keys to my cerebral car, hijacking hope in the process? At what point did I shove trust into a box, ordering it to stay there until I tell it to come out?

This is probably why I love reading books that bust free from the conventional ways we understand time…The Time Traveler’s Wife. Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and why I’m looking forward to reading The Repeat Year by Andrea Lochin. Also why I’m tempted to make a Benjamin Button joke at least once a week. Marty McFly, anyone?

Here’s the thing, I’m taking back the keys. I’m going to embrace the wild idea that the 11^th hour is a limitless playground of becoming and elongated saves.

Have you ever given time too much credit in your life concerning a particular situation? Could we all be living in the 11^th hour?

photo by stock.XCHNG

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”  

-Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea